28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
It’s been a while since I bought storage. $500 for 24TB seems like a steal to me. Not that I have any need for 24TB. Also, I don’t trust Seagate drives. I’d rather have four, 6TB drives than one 24TB drive, but that’s just experience talking–I’ve lost several drives over the years, and most of them were Seagate. YMMV.
Less than a year ago 279 was a baseline price for 24tb
POP ALREADY!
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
Butlerian Jihad When?
It warms the cockles of my heart that I renamed my self hosted LLM’s deep thinking mode to Mentats. For shits and giggles, I made it append every “deep thinking” conclusion it makes with [ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN!].
It’s the simple things, really.
Phew! I just bought three 16TB drives a couple of months ago for my jellyfin setup.
Selling them for $5000 each if anyone is interested.
Do we dare ask why you need 48TB to store media, or do we slowly back out of the room, avoiding eye contact?
Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.
Yes it does. Where do you think they store those gigantic training datasets?
relative to the hard drive market in general, that seems like a drop in the bucket. research labs like CERN write TBs per SECOND
quality data sets don’t even come close
Because the opposite is true. AI uses spinning rust far, far more than it does solid state storage.
My best guess is they want to use the raw materials on more profitable products. Kinda like how consumer PSUs are going up in price. The materials are being used for enterprise PSUs in the datacenter
Just in time for me to want to upgrade the home server storage.
I guess I’m gonna have to salvage old hard drives and deal with the tiny space.
Just finished ripping about 150 of our DVD collection and space was filling up, went looking for HDDs and was surprised at the prices. Now I know why.
I have an invention that… well, you be the judge; What if we take some cheap paper… and put holes in it ? If we place the holes in a certain way, they will resemble digits and we could store information via holes in a paper ‘card’ !!
No more ram/storage problems! …oh, and very organic btw !!
Hm, we probably need a family member to do the punching/reading of holes, but doable.
Whaddoyuthink - is it a killer invention or what ?
I’d like to see a single movie stored on punch cards. It would be massive.
I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more… 😭
Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?
Why HDDs?
All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.
It’s a cascade effect. Memory pricing went up -> Increased price of SSD with DRAM cache -> Increased pricing of DRAM-less SSDs after demand shifted -> HDDs became significantly more cost effective again as a storage device but now the demand for them increased so price went up for them as well.
2 months ago I’ve got Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB for 235€ now that’s the price of 2TB and the 4TB is almost 400€.
I’ve got 8TB Seagate Exos 7E10 8TB for 182€ in May now it’s almost 260€.
We’re fucked…
if you are looking at this from the US that is not necessarily the only thing that could be driving prices up though. You’ve got tariffs and a much weaker dollar than it used to be right now…
US prices are just EU prices + sales tax now
A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.
Storage capacity for datacenters and other data-hungry business operations (think YouTube scale).
Current alternatives don’t reach the same capacity per dollar without caveats (magnetic tape has an incredibly slow seek time and SSDs are too expensive for non-cache usage).
Of course, AI data harvesting is essentially creating artificial (sorry) demand for even more data capacity, and it doesn’t make rational sense for them to use other forms of hardware.
Fun fact - the scale of data involved is so great that Google famously used “sneakernets” (give an employee a backpack of hard drives and tell them to go from A to B) over traditional internet or intranet connections between their larger facilities in the 2010s, because it was faster.
The data used to create that image of the black hole had a transfer speed of 14GB/s because ~700TB of it was captured in Antarctica and spent 14 hours traveling by plane
Yeah right, if they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
The tools which make 1 tb HDDs also make bigger ones.
I work at a data center, and there are indeed big arrays of 1 tb sata HDDs. Although this isn’t for AI, our main clients are local companies and healthcare
My understanding is the large AI companies sign purchase agreements with the manufacturers for X amount of drives. The manufacturers then take whatever chips/platters and build those drives. The AI companies have signed such large agreements that all the chips and layers are going to whatever drives they’re asking for and none left to make consumer drives.
They’re replacing us. Until now, corporations have obviously marketed to the working class, even the poorest of us. And they put in that effort, but now they’re moving past us bottom 90% of consumers and focusing on the top 10% and of course the ultra rich specifically. The top 10% of consumers already accounted for 55% of all buying power in Feb 2025, before tariffs, before the unnamed recession we’re in now, before the shutdown and mass firings.
So now you can imagine what that number is at, and you can see their thought process. It’s just not worth bothering to market and sell to us commoners.
Now, I think they’re stupid and I think they’re way too confident in something like the AI bubble, which will pop eventually. That being said, most new purchases (cars, clothes, electronics, ect…) are by the top 10%. They are gunning for our buying power and they are gunning for our labor power with AI. If they succeed, we will lose our two biggest bargaining chips. The ultra rich know this, and they hate that we have had any say over the economy.
If we’re gonna do this general strike, we gotta do it soon, because they are actively working to make action like that impossible.
They are working an infinite money glitch:
What if we were our own customers? Then we could charge whatever we wanted and just use the money from our dumb investors, and since we are also the producers we make a ton of money on the sales!
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
Bought a 12 TB data center drive that had 3 years of spin time on it for $94 August '24. When I check the eBay listing now I see it’s $220 😵
It keeps feeling like this bubble won’t pop and we’ll just keep riding upwards like the housing market
I don’t think this is sustainable because it seems like a closed loop that eventually stops making money without any new inputs.
People NEED housing, they don’t really need computer components.
My consciousness is on the cloud now, please speak for yourself!
When the bubble bursts, used computer components are going to be real cheap. Even just a few liquidated data centers will provide a ton of used supply. Even if they don’t part them up, that is still a bunch of supply that won’t be drawing on new supply.
Though that supply will be a bit annoying.
Oh look, super expensive GPUs… In an HGX board that is useless for even connecting to a PC, let alone have graphics.
Memory modules, but they are HBM or otherwise soldered to a Grace board…
SSDs, but EDSFF… Guess at least a cage for this could be some for home usage.
HDDs, but SAS. Not too or of reach for home builds, but still not as likely to just plug into home gear as SATA.
They will probably smash it all up and send it out as e-waste.
- want to make a server
- RAM and HDD prices spike
Fuck this
honestly servers don’t need the latest hardware: just build using DDR4 (or even DDR3): it’s half the price per GB or less each step down, and honestly the biggest reason you want RAM in a server is for a ZFS cache, which is going to be bottlenecked on plenty of other things far before your RAM speed (IMO; i’ve done exactly 0 testing)
(though the max size of a DDR3 module is 8GB so on most consumer hardware that will limit you to 32GB total)
I should have bought more DDR5 when I first built mine. I figured I’d be able to add more later so I just focused on a good CPU…
Proxmox cluster and shuck externals I started during the 2008 crash this is how I’d do budget HL
If it’s for a homelab or small project refurbished models are still a good deal but you should hurry, my vendor is running low on hardware that was sitting for years… I got an R630 (40 cores, 64Gb RAM) on offer a few months ago for peanuts…
So computer parts are just the new toilet paper then…
Speaking of toilet paper, if they burn it can can use the heat to boil water and generate electricity. Since they use everything they can get their hands on to generate electricity it might soon be a new tp crisis.
We’ve taken all the blame and put it on AI like it’s acting independently and appeared out of nowhere. This is global collusion to fuck the customers everywhere. It’s people doing this.
Billionaires are not going to give you a chance to decide whether you want a dumb thin AI client or not.
You won’t be able to procure the hardware even if you could afford it.
We are all gonna be some version the brotherhood of steel now
and if you don’t shut up and like it you will be cut out of the internet … black balled by ATT/T Mobile/Verizon while they refuse to drop fiber to the curb but will end up puling the copper off the poles so no more wired internet.
Glad I picked up new NAS drives when I did. 8x 18TB Seagate Exos for $180 each. Two years later its doubled
I am so fucking jealous of you right now.
